WASHINGTON ― Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is perhaps best known for his long history of peddling anti-vaccine misinformation, announced Monday that he’s removing all members of a committee tasked with advising the U.S. government on vaccines.
Kennedy dropped the news in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, disclosing plans to retire all 17 current members of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices. The panel, composed of medical and public health experts who don’t work for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, evaluates the safety, efficacy and clinical need of vaccines to combat the spread of illnesses.
HHS intends to replace the panel with “new members currently under consideration” by the Trump administration, citing concerns about conflicts of interest as the rationale for doing so, per a Monday press release.
Kennedy’s decision is unprecedented and the latest move he’s made to dismantle the existing policy infrastructure for vaccines in the U.S. Members of the panel included epidemiologists, physicians and other public health experts who typically serve four-year terms, and who play an integral role in providing recommendations about who can receive certain vaccines and which vaccines should be distributed.
The stunning development adds to several steps Kennedy has taken to undermine government support for vaccines, including cutting billions in funding for a program aimed at providing vaccines to kids in low-income families, overseeing massive HHS layoffs and changing testing protocols. Prior to his time as a Trump administration official, Kennedy was the head of Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit dedicated to challenging government policies on vaccines and spreading conspiracy theories about COVID-19 immunizations.
Kennedy’s actions inevitably mean that, going forward, HHS’s guidance on vaccine safety will be rooted in misinformation and views from outside the scientific community, said Richard Hughes, a vaccine law and policy expert and a partner at Epstein Becker & Green.
“If the committee fails to make science-based decisions, that poses its own risk to the safety and well-being of the American people,” Hughes told HuffPost. “And that will come in the form of disease outbreaks and actual deaths from diseases we have the tools to prevent.”
In the WSJ op-ed, Kennedy claimed that he was revamping the entire vaccine advisory committee due to concerns about conflicts of interest, alleging that most members of the panel “have received substantial funding from pharmaceutical companies, including those marketing vaccines.” However, ACIP members were already required to share conflicts of interest and recuse themselves from weighing in on vaccines if an issue existed, NBC News reports.
“A clean sweep is necessary to reestablish public confidence in vaccine science,” Kennedy said in the HHS release. “The Committee will no longer function as a rubber stamp for industry profit-taking agendas.”
Kennedy also stated that the panel was previously filled with Biden administration appointees and that Trump’s picks wouldn’t have been able to secure a majority for years if the current members weren’t removed.
Senate Republicans’ initial reactions were mixed.
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), a physician and the chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, previously wavered on even confirming Kennedy over his attacks on vaccines. Cassidy ultimately voted for Kennedy after he promised he would maintain the vaccine advisory panel that he gutted on Monday.
Cassidy disputed the idea that the HSS secretary had just broken his promise.
Kennedy’s promise was about not “changing the process, not the committee itself,” the senator told HuffPost.
The Louisiana Republican also posted on social media that he had just spoken with Kennedy and was assured that he wouldn’t fill the panel “with people who know nothing about vaccines except suspicion.”
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), meanwhile, questioned the HHS secretary’s decision, telling HuffPost that it seemed “excessive to ask for everybody’s resignations” from the panel.
“Generally, I think vaccine and other advisory committees are very helpful to the public,” Collins said. “So to cancel all of the people or cancel the meetings raises serious questions.”
Democrats, all of whom opposed Kennedy’s confirmation to lead HHS, torched his decision to strip medical experts from the panel in charge of keeping people safe from vaccine-preventable diseases.
“Firing experts that have spent their entire lives protecting kids from deadly disease is not reform ― it’s reckless, radical, and rooted in conspiracy, not science,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a statement.
“Wiping out an entire panel of vaccine experts doesn’t build trust — it shatters it, and worse, it sends a chilling message: that ideology matters more than evidence, and politics more than public health,” he said.
Igor Bobic contributed reporting.